Re-reading Animal Farm

The social forces represented by different animals are easily recognisable — Boxer the noble horse as the embodiment of the working class, Moses the raven as the Russian Orthodox church — as are the identifiable individuals played by different pigs. The rivalry between Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky) ends with Snowball’s exile and the subsequent attempt to erase him from the memory of the farm. Stalin had the exiled Trotsky murdered in Mexico less than three years before Orwell began work on the book.